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It would seem that alternative energy sources are our best bet when things like coal and oil run out, but one must remember that there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into mining for the necessary resources (or otherwise procuring them), assembling them into finished products (solar panels, turbines, etc), and transporting them to their installation points. The question is this: can we successfully modify this infrastructure to be self-sustaining before we all run out of oil? That's not a rhetorical question. If any of you technologists out there have any ideas on this matter, I'd love to hear them.

EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) calls all the shots as it has since the primordial ooze. Little else matters for humans or any other living thing.
Humanity, particularly in the "first" world countries, have been on a hayride of fun and thrills since the discovery of coal and then petroleum. We can throw in nuclear as a bit of extra juice, but we all know the dangers, and EROEI of the nuclear industry. That is to say, without massive government protection, nuclear is D E A D as an energy source. So, with the EROEI of petoleum, coal , sunshine, hydro, wind, becoming, or already on the downhill slide, $$$$$$$$$ will be the factor in gathering and using our energy resources.
We have a huge world population directly related to the cheap energy we've been extracting for 300 years. As that energy becomes too expensive to use for the vast majority, the "vast majority" will become much less vast.
The economists with their charts, graphs, PhD's, computer models, corporate backers, are swiftly becoming the necromancers sitting to the side of the various rulers, whether corporate or governmental. As a whole, useless time and money wasters.
Education is always an answer, but what kind of education? I think education cognizant of the future realities of terribly expensive energy, other than water, animal (human and otherwise), and mechanical.
Believe in the technologists if you will, but kepp at least one eye to their real successes, as opposed to their virtual, self agrandizing stories. I think you will see, that for that "vast majority" of humanity, it is back to the future of preindustrial civilization.
Keep dreaming though. It is often a good release mechanism

All the quetions mentioned in the article are rooted in the human nature of competition, which is coded in our gene. Otherwise, why do we just suggest obolishing the grading system in schools, and all pupils will get the same pass regardless of their efforts?

EDUCATION is the key globally. However, it seems to be undergoing revolution (high tech & systemic/institutional) and we do not know yet what transpires for the 21st C.So this is an unknown unknown. Some known unknowns include: roles of governments in economic growth, the nature of entrepreneurship the global digital era, etc.

The challenge of economic progress is that the capital stock is rising at a greater rate than the rate of increase of income; for those at the lower half of the income hierarchy, the rate has actually gone down. This dysfunctional arrangement cannot be cast away as mere consequential evidence that technological progress leaves demented earnings for those at the bottom of the chain.

Martin Wolfe has today rightly pointed out that managerial marginal product, although it has reached its peak, can hardly be measured and Picketty is so right to point that out that it is a significant area of concern how the rise of managerial remuneration has created such a distortion and skewedness in the last two decades alone, when the value of contribution is so much murky.

I think the questions regarding the future of global economy can be approached better and more precisely if we accept the principle that economy, trade is nothing else but the external, practical representation of the interrelationships in between people.
If we also accept the other principle that humanity has evolved into a globally interconnected and interdependent network, which is not man-made but an evolutionary necessity, than we can easily deduce that we are existing in a given system, with given, unchangeable conditions we have to adapt to.
From there it is not difficult to deduce that in this given global, integral system constant quantitative growth is not possible, as such thing does not exist in a sensitively balanced, closed and finite natural ecosystem we are also part of, and that when each and everyone depends on each and every other, and are also fully responsible for each other, the present ruthless, exploitative and wasteful competition has to be replaced by a globally mutual, complementing cooperation.
Social interconnections and economy based on natural necessities and available resources and means, mutually cooperating with each other.